A Professionally Funny Family

Abby Elliott claims that she dropped out of college because mice were urinating on her eyeballs. After graduating from high school in Danbury, Conn., in 2005, she enrolled at a college in New York City, where she was so unhappy to find mice in her dormitory — mice she blamed for giving her a case of conjunctivitis (via said urine) — that she quit before the first semester was over to move to Los Angeles and try to get into show business.

Abby Elliott

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Abby Elliott (left, as Angelina Jolie, with Kristen Wiig) is in her second season on ‘‘Saturday Night Live.’’

This makes a lovely story (“She was convinced that mice were lifting her eyelids at night and going to the bathroom on her eyes,” her father says), but her change of plans may in fact have had a different cause. Abby’s father is the comic actor Chris Elliott, whom no less than David Letterman calls “the funniest man on television.” Chris’s father is Bob Elliott, one half of the legendary radio comedy team Bob and Ray. Bob’s wife’s first husband was Raymond Knight, a radio comedian of the 1930s who was born in 1899, which means that Abby Elliott is heir to, as Wikipedia points out, “a comedic lineage that spans across three centuries.” Which makes her leaving college for show business more likely a matter of destiny than of rodents.

Whichever, the move was successful. Last fall, while her former classmates were still in college, Abby joined the cast of “Saturday Night Live” as a featured player, the show’s youngest female cast member ever. She has distinguished herself there with, among other things, a spot-on impersonation of Angelina Jolie, in whose guise she popped up during “Weekend Update” as it was reporting on the Octomom. “I heard someone had eight babies,” Abby-Angelina purred, hand on hip, long hair swaying, slightly enhanced prosthetic lips pursed. “Does she want all of them?”

Multigenerational acting families are not unusual (Barrymores, Douglases, Bridgeses), but the comedy gene seems to strike one link at a time. What did the Marx Brothers’ children do? Or Jack Benny’s? Or members of any other prominent comedian’s family? “John Wilkes Booth’s was pretty funny,” Chris Elliott told me, but I’m pretty sure he was kidding. (The Stiller family does come to mind — parents Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, son Ben — but that’s only two generations.)

Now that science has discovered genes linked to altruism, thrill-seeking and opposition to nuclear power, you would expect that we could find a gene for humor. Yet the research casts doubt. A study at the Twin Research and Genetic Epidemiology Unit of St. Thomas’s Hospital in London presented 127 pairs of identical and fraternal twins with an assortment of “Far Side” cartoons and found that identical twins liked the same cartoons no more often than fraternal twins did. Identical genes did not produce identical senses of humor. On the other hand, all the siblings did generally agree on what was funny, implying that their shared environments shaped their comic sensibilities.

For a look at Abby Elliott’s environment, I dropped in on her family’s vacation home in Maine during, appropriately, Father’s Day weekend. The house, a handsome shingled cottage, expanded and renovated to Chris Elliott’s own design, sits near the tip of a lushly forested finger of land jutting into the Atlantic. Bob lives with his wife, Lee, a few doors away.

Elliotts arrayed themselves around me in a living room hung with paintings by Chris and Bob (art runs in the family as well as comedy). Chris, who is 49, in a polo shirt and a baseball cap, looked more contained and considerably slimmer than he does on television, where he has frequently doffed his shirt and puffed out his belly for gross comic effect. His wife, Paula, sat next to him wearing a comfortable oversize sweater and sipping white wine. Abby, who is 22 and pretty, and her sister, Bridey (real name Bridget), who is 19 and likewise, sat on a couch next to Bob, who at 86 is an only slightly wizened version of his younger self, which always was a bit elflike. Just beyond a picture window, the waves of Casco Bay smashed on the rocky coast. As I prepared to ask my questions, the family sat up and smiled with the forced cheer of optimists about to be shot.

“They’re pretty shy,” Paula said of her family. “Chris always says, ‘I’m not your performing monkey,’ and I think he encouraged the girls not to let me get them to perform on cue.”

Chris nodded. “I immediately turn into a rock if somebody says, ‘Do that impersonation of so-and-so.’ ” This from a man whose deranged impersonation of a not-quite Marlon Brando was a regular feature on “Late Night With David Letterman” in the 1980s.

“Shy,” Paula said again.

Except when they’re on national television?

“Yeah,” she said. “Exactly.”

I looked around at the smiling faces again. No one was saying anything. Beside me on a couch, a dog lay snoring. I turned to Bob and asked if he thought there was something in his family’s genes that led them to comedy.

“Probably,” he said and resumed his attentive expression.

A few minutes later I broke up the gang and took Bob outside for a private talk. We sat in deck chairs, watching lobster-pot buoys sway in the choppy water, and talked about WHDH in Boston, where Bob was working as a disc jockey in 1946 when the station hired Ray Goulding to read the news; the two of them started joking around on the air until management gave them their own show called “Matinee With Bob and Ray.” (They would have been known as “Ray and Bob,” Ray said later, if the word “matinee” had happened to be “matinob.”) We talked about the television show they did in the early 1950s with a young actress named Audrey Meadows until Jackie Gleason saw her on it and offered her a role in a thing he was doing called “The Honeymooners.” And about the literally thousands of hours of radio comedy that he and Ray produced until Ray’s death in 1990. (When the Museum of Broadcasting — now the Paley Center for Media — ran a Bob and Ray retrospective in 1982, it was 25 hours long.)

“We never really did jokes,” Bob said, which is only partly true. But the extent to which their humor lacked conventional comic structure accounts for its enduring appeal to an enthusiastic if nonmainstream audience. On the way to meet the Elliotts, I listened to a 1959 radio show in which Bob interviewed Ray in the persona of Barry Campbell, a hambone actor and bandleader who was one of their many recurring creations. Campbell had come into the studio to plug a live album of his band recorded at a New Jersey restaurant. “It went very well,” Campbell said. “Unfortunately there’s a little thing in the background that the editor couldn’t get out.” Bob obligingly put the record on, and syrupy big-band music played until a man (one of Bob’s voices) was heard shouting, “Hey, I ordered a rare steak!” The band played on. “That’s as rare as you’re gonna get it,” a waiter (played by Ray) replied. The band played on. “Well, don’t pay for it,” advised the complaining man’s wife (Ray in a trilling female voice, one of his specialties). “I’m not gonna pay for it. Here, take it back.” “Don’t push that plate at me, mister!” “Oh, yeah?” And, as the band still played, plates crashed, cutlery clanged, grunts were grunted, blows were landed.

Bob stopped the record. “There seems to be an awful lot of confusion there,” he said. “You could hardly hear the music.”

“I’ve had that complaint from everybody,” Campbell grudgingly conceded. “But what do you think? It’s a beautiful sound I’ve got there.”

“It’s a sound,” said Bob.

Which was all very funny and, arguably, a joke. But the routine didn’t end there. Instead, Bob asked, “How about your movie work?”

“Well,” Campbell said, “I tried out for the Martin Van Buren role, and they thought I was a little too young-looking to play him.”

“You could play Martin in his younger days,” Bob suggested.

“They’re not going to cover that part of his life,” Campbell replied.

“That’s the one they’re shooting up in Woodbridge, N.H., isn’t it?”

“That’s right, Bob. And they’ve brought over I don’t know how many actors from France to portray his cabinet.”